Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Worth the Wait : A little patience can get a great game for cheap!

What gamer
hasn't been excited at least once by the announcement of a new triple-A game.
It's tempting, especially if it's another installment in a much loved
series like Call of Duty or Battlefield.

The glitzy E3 announcements, polished trailer
videos and all those special goodies (gotta have that Fallout 4 backpack right?)
just for being one of "the first" to have a new game on launch day
are a few of the carefully crafted enticements provided by multi-million dollar
marketing departments who only exist to get you to part with as much of your
hard earned cash as they can.

But if
we're honest, we know that we've been fooled before and more often than not if
it's our own money we're spending there's going to be at least some degree of
buyer's remorse.

I'm not one
of those people that you'd call flush
with the green stuff so I've adopted some hard and fast rules when it comes to
new games based on years of experience.

The reality
is that gamers are getting older and with age one would hope comes at least
some wisdom.

If not,
well, you're probably playing with your
fingers and toes right about now anyway so I can't help you . However, if you've got more patience than a 5
year old and understand that nobody really cares if you're in the first 100,000
to play a game on launch day, you could score some great deals.

It's a
policy I call, "Worth the Wait."

It's not
just a statement, it's a call to action or rather INACTION!

It goes
like this: Instead of paying extra for
pre-orders or full price on release day just sit back and watch the madness for
awhile.

Besides, I've
yet to see a game launch in the past 10 years that didn't have major screw-up's. That's usually followed up by gigabytes of
patch updates not to mention server outages and sluggish rollouts of driver support from the likes of AMD and
Nvida.

The not so
well-kept dirty little secret is that a video game is never really
"done" and never is that more true than on launch day. Release schedules have to be met even if the code
hasn't been passed through QA. That
means what your Pre-order really bought you was the right to be among the first
to be stuck at the launch screens for hours.
Yay!

All things
that can make you wonder what it was you were so excited about in the first
place.

Don't do
that to yourself.

Wait
awhile, there's very real benefit (and value) to patience and you usually end
up getting more for less.

For
example, Let's take a look at the initial releases of TitanFall, Battlefield 4
and Battlefront. Yeah, I know all EA
titles but their wildly inflated pre-orders, aggressive marketing and ultimate
fire sales are the best examples of how you can get the best deal (AKA VALUE)
just by waiting a bit.

Let's start
with TitanFall.

In 2014,
Respawn Entertainment was looking for a vehicle to thumb their noses at former
employers Activision. Under EA's umbrella, they released TitanFall and the rest
was as they say, history. The game's
launch was the typical EA Triple-A release with the now standard $60 price tag
for the standard version and "collector's editions" going for twice
that price not to mention a special Xbox One bundle for $500.

Many people
bought it and not long after many were wondering why they paid so much...

In the year
after launch, EA would continually push "free weekends" through its
Origin client to little effect. The price
finally settled down to around $20 for the "Deluxe" version just this
past Christmas.

In effect
the less than stellar sales forced EA to resort to the same tactic they tried a
year earlier to boost the epic failure that was Medal of Honor: Warfighter.

Predictably,
on launch the game had the now familiar issues with server outages (
particularly on Xbox) glitches and seemingly endless patches. A year or so out, prices were cut in half and
all those gameplay issues were a distant
memory. It was never the mess that
Warfighter was. It was just a
multiplayer version of Call of Duty with Mechs.
The problem was it got old fast without a regular stream of DLC.

That should
have been very much in line with EA's DLC Disease business strategy but content
was slow to arrive and launch day content was kind of thin. That's why it got cheap fast.

But it's
not a bad game and the best part is that you didn't really miss anything but a
lot of pain by waiting. Well, unless
you've got a YouTube gaming channel dependant on hyping new releases. You don't see many Titanfall videos but then
again who cares.

The last I
checked, all that delicious DLC is FREE!

Next
case...

Battlefield
4... Heh, my favorite whipping boy. A
game with so much promise yet such horrible execution that EA's mishandling of
the launch landed them in court. Server
outages, crashes, Blue Screens, slipping DLC release schedules and a broken
game engine that developer DICE could do little more than band-aid.

That's why
Battlefront launched with a completely new game engine shared with Battlefield 1.

All that
aside, however, the game that launched in late 2013 has in 3 years gone from $120
for the "premium" edition ( $50 for the standard edition) to as
little as $15 for the Deluxe edition today.
If you happened to own the "Premium" version of the game last
year there's no doubt you were feeling
at least a little foolish when EA
decided to make all the DLC packs
free. You literally could have picked up
the base game for $10 at one point and had the same amount of content as if you
paid 10x more just a few months earlier.

That's what
I call a patience payoff...

The best
part is now that Battlefield 4 has put most of its problems behind it you can
get a great deal without suffering those launch day blues.

On to the
most recent EA money Grab, Star Wars: Battlefront

Battlefront
was little more than a refresh of the original EA game series from the early
2000's with the added marketing tie-in to the release of "Star Wars Episode
7: The Force Awakens" It was built
on top of EA's newest tweak to the Frostbite 3 game engine (yes THAT Frostbite 3) A few minutes in
Battlefield 1's setup screens and map
style bear it out.

Battlefront
has finally made it to my list of games worth waiting for. On launch the game was horribly overpriced
with standard editions being upwards of $60 and some versions closer to
$200. A year later? The "Deluxe" edition could be had
for as little as $13 from EA during the holiday sale. The normal price is $39.99 which in itself is
a $20 drop off launch.

The lesson
here? There's nothing wrong with waiting.
Even popular games like the 2014 hit Watchdogs originally going for as
much as $70 on launch day could be had for as little as $9 during the
recent Steam holiday sale.

Watchdogs
had its own issues including server outages and glitches on launch by the
way. Now, you can reap the benefits of
everyone else who PAID FULL PRICE to be
BETA TESTERS for the rest of us.

I feel I
owe the rabid fanboys a note of thanks for that one...

Now some
may say that if everyone did this the game developers would go out of
business. To that I say, BULLSHIT.

I've been
writing about gaming for 6 years now and one thing I know for certain is that
the old adage of "a fool and his money are soon parted" has never
been more true than with video games.
Rabid fans of a franchise will beg, borrow or steal to be the first to
get a new game and pay a premium price to do so. Luckily for the EA, Ubisoft and Activisions of
the world, there's a lot of them out
there and God bless 'em for it.

If they've
got the money to waste, I say let them.
I'm more than happy to have someone else pay for me to have a better
experience later on. If you've got a bit
more maturity than a 12 year old, you can do the same.